


scorpionfish

by verdenal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Silent Hill Fusion, Dark, Inspired by Silent Hill 2, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 21:52:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13749939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: Keith goes down to a new planet to look for a rebel group that supposedly has its hideout there, and hopes that he'll find Shiro, too. He finds something, at least. [Silent Hill 2 fusion]He has a good feeling about this. The fog is so thick and still that it wouldn’t surprise Keith if it looked like part of the lake from above. The ideal place for a rebel cell to hide out. It’s what Keith would do, after all. But there are no sounds around him except for the steady hum of the bike beneath him. Keith has never been on a planet this silent. All he can smell is the damp, heavy smell of the fog and a hint of engine oil.





	scorpionfish

**Author's Note:**

> This draws heavily on Silent HIll 2, so any general content warnings for that game also apply to this.
> 
> Find me on tumblr @ weird-tint

There’s no question that Keith will be the one going down to the planet. The terrain is too rough to be traversed on foot, and the lions are too high-profile to be used on a search for a rebel cell. So they send Keith down with an Altean take on the hoverbike and some cartographic software that Pidge insists is user-friendly.

The landscape reminds him of the desert around the Garrison, but spikier. Less hospitable. There’s no way any lifeforms could be hiding out here. There aren’t even any outcroppings large enough to be cave mouths, and the survey from the Castle hadn’t revealed any subterranean structures. His best bet is to look for water and then go from there. The map shows what looks like a lake within reasonable distance, so Keith points the bike that way and lets his mind drift. 

He used to ride through the desert like this, during the year he spent looking for Shiro. It wasn’t that he thought he would find anything in particular, although he now knows that the energy of the Blue Lion was what was drawing him out so often. It was a relief to sink into his own reflexes back then, and the pleasure of that experience hasn’t dimmed. _Rock to your left_ , his mind tells him, _the incline is getting steeper two meters ahead_. He takes the incline at a higher speed and thrills at the sensation of the ground falling out beneath him. It’s not like the cliffs around the Garrison, but it’s better than nothing. 

Up ahead he can see what must be the lake, glinting in the dim, malevolent light of the planet’s sun. He’ll go around the perimeter first. If he needs to stay down overnight, the shore of the lake is probably the best spot.

Keith doesn’t like lakes, really. Or bodies of water in general. The only time he’s ever really spent time in or around the water was at the Garrison, when they went a few hours out and worked on water landings. It was the worst Keith had ever done in any class (although even then he was still near the top). Shiro had found it baffling and had tried to get him to go swimming with the rest of the cadets afterwards. Keith had begrudgingly waded in. In spite of himself he’d had a good time ( _because of Shiro_ , that treacherous little voice says, _because he put his hands on you_ ). 

Shiro’s hands, Keith remembers. Big and warm, calloused, deft on his back and his face and his neck. 

Now is not the time. The lake is growing larger as Keith approaches it, swallowing the entire horizon. He’ll should be at the shore in minutes, but there’s a dense fog rolling out from the lake that makes it impossible for him to actually see anything at the water’s edge. It will make navigating a challenge, but Keith’s never backed down from a challenge and he’s not about to start now.

He makes it about a quarter of a mile along the lake’s western edge ( _Western is an Earth-centric notion. It’s meaningless out here_ , he can hear Pidge say) before speeding through the fog feels too much like drowning and he’s forced to slow the bike to almost a crawl. At least the ground is flatter here, although it’s probably not so much ground as mud. It might be faster at this point just to go on foot and hope for the best, but he needs to at least find a landmark to stash his bike near, or hell never hear the end of it. 

He has a good feeling about this. The fog is so thick and still that it wouldn’t surprise Keith if it looked like part of the lake from above. The ideal place for a rebel cell to hide out. It’s what Keith would do, after all. But there are no sounds around him except for the steady hum of the bike beneath him. Keith has never been on a planet this silent. All he can smell is the damp, heavy smell of the fog and a hint of engine oil.

And then, as though he’s summoned it, a shape emerges from the fog. An unmoving outline that can’t be anything but a dwelling. It’s so low to the ground that Keith immediately imagines a web of tunnels spiraling out from it, even though Allura said the Castle’s sensors had found no evidence of anything like that.

He parks his bike in front of it and creeps around the perimeter of the stone house. There’s a door at the front but no windows and no signs of habitation. The mud around the house is packed tight but Keith can’t see any footprints. If there’s anyone in there, they’re hiding too well for Keith to notice them. 

The door sticks at first, but he works at it with his knife and manages to dislodge whatever bit of rock had been in the way, and then the door slowly moves inward. It makes a heavy stone sound that makes the hairs on the back of Keith’s neck stand up. There are no other sounds in the air. Everything is blanketed by the fog.

Keith finds nothing inside the house. There are a few shelves on the far wall and patterns in the dirt like furniture has been shifted around recently. The place reminds him more of his shack in the desert than he’d be willing to admit out loud. In the corner to the right of the door the dirt is more disturbed than the rest, as though there’s been more activity around it. Keith waits for his eyes to better adjust to the dark, and creeps forward.

There’s a hole. 

He’s surprised at the lack of some sort of trapdoor covering, but the yawning darkness inside the tunnel probably does enough to drive away any nosy travelers.

Keith does have the presence of mind at least to look for some sort of ladder, but there isn’t one. He pauses for a moment to think about the fact that if he jumps down he might not be able to get back up. On the other side of the scale, of course, is the hope that there is a rebel group down in the tunnels, equipped with skills and technology that have kept them both hidden and dangerous for generations. 

(And, if Keith is being honest with himself, _isn’t this just the sort of place Shiro would go to hide_?)

He hits the floor with a soft thump; it’s dirt, just like the floor of the cabin. Once his eyes adjust Keith can see that there are rusting wall sconces that must have once held torches. There’s nothing left for him to use to light his way, but in his fanny packs he has a head-mounted lamp that should still have its charge.

He definitely looks like an idiot but the great advantage of doing this recon mission alone is that there’s no one here to tell him that. Not that he isn’t prepared to argue on behalf of the headlamp, which leaves his hands free to defend himself and is never accidentally pointed where he doesn’t want it to. Unfortunately the beam is weak and the darkness is deep, so Keith moves more slowly through the tunnel than he would like.

The air is cold and damp, as though the fog has begun to filter down there, too. Keith has the sudden unsettling feeling that he’s inside something living. Maybe the planet is alive, like Balmora was, or something worse. The walls don’t move beneath his palms, though. He decides, just in case, to keep one hand there as he inches through the tunnel.

Up ahead the quality of the darkness shifts. Keith can hear a faint scuffling, too. His impulse for some reason is to rush forward into the cavern that must be in front of him. There’s an energy on this planet, concentrated in these tunnels or maybe around the lake, that is pulling Keith forward. It reminds him of the Blue Lion out in the desert, but bounced off of a mirror and refracted back to him. 

The sound grows louder. There’s someone in room up ahead. Several someones, if his hearing can be believed. He makes his way to the mouth of the room and switches off his headlamp. There’s a torch lit to his left, and a table and chairs in its light. Someone is hunched over in one of the chairs.

When Keith moves into the room the torch casts his shadow over the other body. He freezes and waits for any sign of movement. There’s nothing but the faint twitch of muscles under skin (or what Keith perceives as muscles under what he perceives as skin). Keith stills and the beast is still. He inches forward and its back moves again. 

This isn’t what he was expecting to find. They’ve seen a lot of different lifeforms during their journey, but nothing quite like this. Keith can feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, so he slides his knife out of its sheath, and moves forward.

The thing at the table shrieks and turns to face him. Keith freezes. He waits for it to rush him before he realizes, with a sick swooping sensation in his stomach, that it can’t. Whatever it is ( _the monster_ , he tells himself) is stuck to the chair.

“Stuck” doesn’t really do it justice. What Keith is faced with is a shrieking pound of flesh, mottled red and purple, that have grown into the stone. As Keith dashes past, the thing turns its head to follow him, and Keith briefly locks eyes with it.

_I want to die. I want you to cut me free. I want to die. I want to be free. I want I want I want_

If he cuts it loose, it will kill him. But it’s screaming in his head, now, too, and Keith stops at the far door to look back.

 _Whose face is that_ , something in him asks, _why do I know that face_? 

It looks like any face on any monster Keith has ever seen. He runs forward.

After that encounter he starts inching through the tunnels with his headlamp off, knife in his hand. Once he gets far enough away that the monster’s shrieking either stops or becomes inaudible, a horrible silence falls. Keith can’t even hear dirt crumbling off of the walls, or the movement of air through the tunnels. For a moment even his own breathing gets lost in it, and Keith wonders if he’s dead. The monster could have killed him as he ran past it, and now he’s just waiting for his mind to catch up to his body and realize it’s all over. He could have died on the planet surface, crashing his bike into one of the rock formations; he could have died on his way down to the planet. He could have died years ago.

This isn’t helpful, he tells himself. 

Then, out of the silence comes a skritching noise. Keith can’t tell where it’s coming from, except that it’s not directly behind him. It’s as though something is scratching in the walls around him and also up ahead. 

He rests his hand on the wall for a moment and feels only cool, damp earth. Still, too. Nothing is moving underneath the soil that he can feel. Whatever it is must be up ahead. 

The quality of the darkness tells him that the tunnel widens. That must be where the rats are waiting for him; he assumes they’re rats because he can’t think of anything else that lives underground and makes that sort of sound. But then, this is the infinity of the universe he’s coming up against.

With that in mind, he hopes for rats. 

The closer he gets the softer the sound, until by the time Keith reaches the point where the tunnel widens, he can barely hear anything. Except. Then.

Breathing that isn’t his own. In time with his, and loud, like there are more lungs than any one person could have. 

Keith switches on his headlamp and the cavern before him erupts into screams.

 _Everything here is so loud_ , he thinks. _It should be quiet underground_. Space has been quiet. The desert had been quiet. Keith is from quiet places. Quiet sits well and heavy on his shoulders like a jacket he had worn back at the Garrison, a little too warm and large but familiar and therefore trustworthy. 

The things are no more than waist-high on him, so Keith cleaves through at least half a dozen soft bodies before he finally gets a good look at what sort of beasts are crowding around him. 

They look like the monster from the big room, in that they are definitely made of flesh but in a horrible cobbled-together way that implies something unnatural about them. They look almost human except that they have clawed fingers and yellow, pupil-less eyes. Like Galra, Keith notices. They look like someone stuck little Galra bits onto humans.

There’s a momentary kinship that strikes him, but the one of the little assholes gets their teeth-sharp, too sharp for a human-into his thigh and the wave of pain rips away any good feelings he may have had. He yelps in pain and kicks the thing off of his leg. But as soon as it’s gone (and he hears the crunch of its bones against the wall) there are three more in its place. They won’t stop coming. He has to get through them.

Kieth kicks and slashes his way through the mob and longs for something to burn them with. If he’s yelling while he does so, grunt with each impact and swearing at every new monster that rushes at his knees, that’s his own damn business. He’s sick of having to be quiet all the time. If everything down here gets to scream, so should he.

 _Why are you so quiet_ , Shiro would ask him, at times when it was perfectly normal to be quiet. Shiro, who wasn’t even that loud of a person. _Who told you to be quiet_. As though that were a question anyone was capable of answer. _Who told you to be quiet_.

The stupid little beasts don’t seem to like the sound and scatter before him when he screams, though of course they come back. Once he gets into the narrower tunnel he turns to face the oncoming tide. He has some strength still; he can stand here and slaughter them until there are none left. 

After a while it becomes rhythmic: slash kick kick slash. A couple of times Keith talks himself into believing that they’ve stopped pouring out from wherever they’re coming from. But they’re not stopping. He has reserves of energy but knows that if he taps into them the aftermath of this will be a disaster. But then, this is already a disaster. He won’t be able to outrun them for long and they probably know the tunnels better than he does.

He keeps fighting.

He gives up on the idea that they’ll stop. He gives up on the idea that he’ll outlast them. He is going to die here and he hasn’t even fucking found anything. No rebels, no maps, no intel.

_No?_

It doesn’t matter what he’s looking for. He’s not going to find it because he’s going to die. Not as soon as he wants but too soon. That sort of thing. It gets tedious after a while, but that’s the beat that’s always going in his head. 

_You look like you could use a hand._

That’s not in his head. There’s someone speaking to him, coming up from his left side, moving right past his ear to start laying in to the little hybrids. Keith tries not to look, because it’s either another, smarter, bigger monster (and he doesn’t want to deal with that right now) or he’s hallucinating (which he also doesn’t want to deal with right now). 

Whoever it is certainly deals a lot of real damage for a hallucination. Monster, then, who’s playing some sort of awful mind game with him. If he doesn’t look, it doesn’t win. And now that it’s two against a million, the hybrids have begun to slow their assault. Keith can actually see the end of the mob.

When it’s done, Keith finally has to turn to his savior. 

He feels like he’s been punched in the diaphragm. _Shiro?_

“Uh, not quite. They call me Ro.”

_There are others here. Who?_

“Not anymore. They already left, in case the Galra had found the base. I stayed behind to clean up.”

_So you have a way out._

“Yeah. Probably the same way you got in.”

_The hole?_

Ro’s face goes blank. “I didn’t know about any hole. We should probably stick together. That way I can show you the actual exit, and we’ll stand a better chance against whatever the hell those things were.”

_They looked like Galra-human hybrids. There was something else, too, but I don’t think it’s able to move._

Ro still looks worried, but he flashes Keith a smile that goes straight to the pit of his stomach. “Then who knows what else is lurking out there. They must not like groups, or they would have been all over the place before.”

 _It seems kind of like they were waiting for something._ Keith shrugs off any attempt at a reply to that. He doesn’t actually know what he meant by that, though he remembers the first monster sitting at the table. You don’t sit at a table like that unless you’re waiting for something.

Ro ( _Shiro_ ) is watching him closely as they fall in step with one another. He has a Galra arm, too, and its lit up purple just like Shiro’s would be. Now Keith can’t focus on his surroundings because in order to do that he has to filter out his companion and he can’t seem to do that. 

_I thought you were Shiro. I think you might still be Shiro, somehow._

“Everything before I got to the group is pretty much a blur. Whoever gave me the new arm must’ve wiped my memories, too. But I don’t remember Shiro. If that was my name I’d remember it, right?”

Keith just shrugs again. Occasionally hybrids strike out at them as they soldier on, but their only real strength is in numbers and it’s easy to flick them off and against the walls, where their little bodies crumple with a shriek and a wet sound. 

In the dim lighting provided by only Keith’s headlamp and Ro’s arm, Keith can pretend that he’s back at the Garrison, spelunking with Shiro on one of their rare days off. They’d never gone to the caves out in the desert together, but it’s an easy thing to imagine. They would have to sneak off the premises, because there’s no way anyone would authorize something like a daytrip to the middle of the desert. But sneaking off was easy enough, between Shiro’s easy charisma and reputation and Keith’s stealth abilities. 

It’d be a poorly planned outing, like this one. No food or water, no maps, just comfortable silence. Shiro would crowd against him, simply because he’s so broad and the tunnel-caves so narrow. _His hands are on you more than they need to be_. Not anymore, in the real-tunnels, where Ro keeps a more friendly distance between them, but certainly back in the cave-tunnels, and once in the lake. In the cave-tunnels Keith doesn’t imagine that there’d be anything for them to fight. 

In the real-tunnels things seem to be calming down. Keith could talk to Ro if he wanted. He wants to.

“Who’s Shiro?”

 _How can I answer that. You’re Shiro._

“I could be. I feel like I’d know, though.”

A low moan ripples through the air and saves Keith from having to respond. It sounds like something big. It sounds almost like whale song.

Now there’s no time for walking arm-to-arm. They stagger themselves and crouch, weapons at the ready. There are no footsteps to accompany the sound. Together they inch forward, and Keith believes more than ever that this must be Shiro, that he must have finally found what he’s been looking for. Keith does not simply click with people that he meets. That was always Shiro’s gift. But now Keith feels as though he’s finally back where he belongs, and no one has ever made him feel that way except Shiro.

_What he remembers: Shiro, and Shiro again, or maybe not Shiro, but the hideous purple light of his arm and his voice. Shiro’s voice, of course, and his own loud in his ears, and Matt’s. Shiro, and then he’s gone, and then Shiro, and he’s gone, and over and over again until who can tell who has gone and who has come back. At some point they have to do something about it._

“I can’t hear anything coming.”

Keith presses closer. Ro lets him. The rush of warmth that he gets from Ro’s body and from his arm is a welcome sensation, and it fills him with heady joy that is not appropriate for the situation at all.

“We should be fine as long as we keep quiet,” Ro says, and the glow of his arm dies. “I can’t believe I never knew that any of this was under here.”

_If we should be quiet, then you should stop talking._

“Do you want me to be quiet?” Ro teases. “I meant normal quiet, not silent quiet. Don’t you think that if this thing wanted to kill people, there’d be bodies everywhere already.”

_The rebels never heard it._

“No. We had no idea. No one had any idea. I told you.”

_If you’re going to talk, tell me something new._

“You’ve got an attitude, huh?”

Keith doesn’t dignify that with a response. Shiro had never had any actual problems with Keith’s attitude, so this shouldn’t be any different.

“I could tell you about the rebels. They’re probably why you’re here, anyway.”

Keith just shrugs. The less he says the better, he figures. He can’t come on too strong, too fast, or Ro will skitter away from him back into the darkness of the tunnels. Keith has everything he’s been looking for right at his fingertips, and yet he can’t shake the sickly feeling that when he returns to the surface he’ll be left with nothing, again. 

Ro’s voice, though, is soothing, and Keith leans into it as they make their way towards the source of the howling. It’s easy to listen to him, both because his voice has worn deep grooves into Keith’s mind and he’s telling Keith exactly what he’s been hoping to hear. After years worth ( _a lifetime’s worth_ , whispers a dramatic little imp in the back of his head) of bad news, Keith deserves to have something go right.

The rebels had been in the tunnels for years before they decided to move. Not for any particular reason, Ro told him, but simply because it was too dangerous to get used to staying in one place, and they’d been picking up more and more chatter in nearby space. Ro won’t tell him where they’ve gone now, and Keith wonders briefly if that’s because Ro doesn’t actually know. Maybe he got left behind to clean things up because the rebels no longer trust him. Maybe they think he’s a Galra sleeper agent.

_You can’t tell anyone else, Matt had said. Not yet. Not even Katie knows. I cam to you because you’re the only other one who could see it._

Ro does tell him where they had been before, which as good a gesture of goodwill as any. He has a carefree, breezy way of speaking that reminds Keith of how Shiro had been at the Garrison, sometimes. Even then he’d had an outsized sense of responsibility that at once impressed Keith and irritated him. Ro lacks that somehow, despite his time with the rebels and whatever had come before that. _Whatever had come before that, whatever there had been, that Keith had never heard about, that Keith had maybe even known nothing about. What does Keith know about Shiro anyway—_

“We’ll probably have to go see what the final boss is, at some point,” Ro says. 

Keith snorts. _Final boss_. If only things were that simple.

“But we should probably take a break for now. Those little bastards really wore me out.”

Keith nods his assent. He can’t imagine where in this maze they could find a safe place to rest, but Ro seems to know his way around. The rebels must have stopped working at least some times, although if the monsters had been here when they were, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they had kept obsessive shifts and learned to sleep standing up.

But Ro finds a little enclave easily enough, and tells Keith he’ll keep first watch. Keith shouldn’t trust a man he just met (although time is plastic down here, moldable under the subterranean pressure) but he looks so much like Shiro.

_Around the fire, what might have been years ago. Shiro’s eyes crinkled equally with fondness and with pain._

Keith sleeps.

Ro wakes him later; Keith can’t even begin to guess how much time has passed. He didn’t dream. He rarely does, in space.

Ro doesn’t need to rest, he says. Keith doesn’t believe him, and sits him down where Keith had been. Ro argues for a little but Keith turns his back to him and watches the shadows ahead until the voice behind him quiets. He lets himself feel smug for a moment before he reminds himself that this isn’t Shiro and there’s nothing in this to celebrate.

 _He could have been brainwashed. He could have been. He could have been what._ It isn’t worth it to go down this line of thinking. Ro is enough, for now; he has to be. When he gets back to the Castle they’ll be able to find the answers.

Where Keith goes while Ro sleeps is a mystery even to him, and he files it away for later consideration as they begin walking towards the monster.

“Final boss,” Ro calls it. Keith hates him; his humor slides between Keith’s ribs, the knife of memory.

Ro insists he has no idea what could be waiting for them in the tunnels ahead. Hes never seen any of these things before; they must have come after the rebels left. The implication that they were in the soil all along, waiting for a space to fill, sits badly with Keith.

_Root them out and clean the soil._

_I think I have to do this alone._ He doesn’t look at Ro because he’s been in this situation countless times before. Keith likes to do things alone, largely because it suits him, but also because he has gotten used, over the years, to having no other choice. Shiro had never been able to accept that. This won’t be any different, and Keith digs his heels in, ready to fight.

“I think you’re right.”

Keith turns to face Ro so quickly he can feel the bones in his neck crack in protest.

“They didn’t come until you did.”

_You said they came after the rebels left. You lied. They’ve always been here waiting._

“The rebels left, you came. What difference does it make? They’re obviously not my fault. They’re not here for me.”

_This isn’t my fault. Monsters aren’t anyone’s fault._

Ro just laughs. “Of course monsters are someone’s fault. And you know you have to clean up your own messes.”

Keith doesn’t have a response for that because he knows Ro is right.

Ro isn’t coming with him. Keith feels profoundly alone, in the way he had when he had first descended into the tunnels, in the way he had when he’d lived alone in the desert. It’s a condition that Keith has learned to live with. It shouldn’t hurt the way it does now.

Ro watches him leave with an expression Keith can’t fathom. 

Keith turns back around. _Please. Please come with me. I’m tired of doing these things alone._

Ro looks torn, at least. “I don’t know if I’d be much help anyway.” The meanness that Keith had seen in him previously has faded away. Keith wonders if he can control Ro just with the power of his desire ( _and how sick is that, that your wanting could do this_ ).

His face softens and Keith feels sick with it. “I’ll come with you to the doorway, but that’s it.”

Keith nods. Good enough. Better than nothing.

They don’t talk as they continue through the tunnels, towards the beast. Still better than nothing. Still enough. 

No parting words when they reach the shadowed, cavernous entrance to the beast’s lair. Still enough. Still enough.

The beast is waiting for him and it looks like a final boss. It’s horrible, a horrible huge mountain of flesh and fur. Keith has to strain his neck just to take in the scope of the thing. 

_I’m going to die here_. Like a burst of lightning through his skull. The thing turns and Keith realizes he’s been looking at it’s back the whole time.

It has yellow eyes like knife blades in what must be its skull, which is just humanoid enough for Keith to place the rest of its features. It opens its mouth and Keith can see a gleaming row of teeth, but then no sound comes.

Instead there’s the squalling cry of an infant, and Keith’s eyes track down to the beast’s torso, where he can just see a tiny head poking out from between great folds of flesh. 

_If you kill me, your heart’s desire will be granted when you step from this chamber._

So it goes. The beast is huge and dangerous but when it has Keith pinned to the wall something goes wrong with it’s face and Keith wriggles away. 

And on and on. The only sounds that come from the beast are the baby’s squalls. Eventually, it stops crying.

_Your heart’s desire will be waiting._

He feels hot and sick with it, with need for whatever the beast has left for him on the other side.

Ro is there, arms crossed, leaning against the wall like he had when Keith left him. But he’s changed; his hair is longer over his forehead, and the cant of his body is towards Keith. Ro never held himself like that. 

Keith had been right all along. Shiro was here, waiting for him. A test, and he’d passed.

He rushes to Shiro and throws his arms around him, murmurs his name over and over, not waiting for Shiro to react to him because he knows now who he’s with.

So he’s prepared for Shiro to stiffen in his arms, but not for him to lash out and shove Keith away.

“Don’t tell me you thought _I_ was Shiro.”

 _Yes._ As much as he had thought about anything. Or he had wanted him to be. He’d heard what the beast had to say and done with it as he willed.

“Really.”

 _No._ No, he hadn’t thought that. Or, well, he’d thought it but he’d never believed. Or maybe it was the other way around; he’d believed that Ro was Shiro and had been to afraid to actually let himself think it.

“You know what happened to Shiro, don’t you?”

 _Yes._ No. Keith doesn’t know and that’s the whole point of it.

“You really thought he was here, in this dirt pile?”

 _He’s been in stranger places._ If Keith were part of a secret rebel group (well, another one, a smaller one, one with longer odds) this is the sort of place that he would hide. Shiro would have those same instincts too. That Keith believes.

Ro is wearing a smile that Keith can’t imagine on Shiro’s face as he leans against the wall. Keith hasn’t played a lot of video games, but he’s pretty sure this isn’t what happens after you beat the big boss. You’re supposed to get out of the dungeon and something good is supposed to happen to you. 

The curve of Ro’s body is something good. Keith is allowed that at least.

“You know what happened to Shiro, don’t you?”

_No need to say it again._

“You know what happened to Shiro, don’t you?”

_You know what happened to Shiro, don’t you. Shut up. Shut up._

The clarity of coming up from out of the water, which Keith has only ever known once before, at the lake, a thousand years ago, with Shiro. 

It’s not clarity of a linear narrative, but a series of perfect pictures that Keith knows are tied together somehow.

_Matt says, you’re the only one who could see it, don’t tell anyone. And Keith starts looking where before he had been afraid to, and Matt’s too right about it, and now Keith can’t see anything else and it makes him sick to his stomach. When Shiro smiles at him Keith is trying to look at the space behind his teeth, and when his right arm comes into view Keith suddenly feels a sick wave of fear where before there had been nothing like that._

He remembers the feeling of it, more than anything.

_We have to do something, was Keith’s response in the end. The red paladin is about action._

He remembers only that something had to be done. He remembers the set of Matt’s jaw and the way their eyes looked in the windows of the castle.

_Fake a distress call. Matt can do that. Keith and Shiro go out. Keith has to do this alone. Matt had insisted. It’s a kindness. Whatever that means._

Keith remembers a kindness. 

_Keith made it fast. He thinks. Can you put your arms around someone you thought you loved. Can you do that to them. Keith has learned to make a lot of difficult decisions but never this. What gives him the right. What gives anyone the right to do this. Cold hands. Someone’s. What gave them the right. He might be crying. It feels like an out of body experience. Maybe it is._

Keith remembers.

There’s only ever been one way out of the tunnels. So he finds it, and he climbs and he climbs and he finally breaks free of the earth and into something vast and flat, slate and unforgiving.

Keith is out in the middle of the water, and there are hands all over his body. He doesn’t know how to swim.


End file.
